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ESSAY July 1943 Issue

The Round World and the Winning o the Peace

By Sir Halford J. Mackinder

I HAVE been asked to carry further some o the themes with which I have dealt in my
past writings, in particular to consider whether my strategical concept o a "Heartland"
has lost any o its significance under the conditions o modern warfare. In order to set
the concept into its context, I must begin with a short account o how it originally
came to take shape.

My earliest memory o public affairs goes back to the day in September 1870 when, as
a small boy who had just begun attendance at the local grammar school, I took home
the news, which I had learned from a telegram affixed to the post office door, that
Napoleon III and his whole army had surrendered to the Prussians at Sedan. This
came as a shock to Englishmen, who still moved mentally in the wake o Trafalgar and
the retreat from Moscow, but the full effect o it was not realized until some years
later. Britain's supremacy on the ocean had not yet been challenged, and the only
danger she saw at that time to her overseas empire was in the Asiatic position of
Russia. During this period the London newspapers were quick to detect evidence of
Russian intrigue in every rumor from Constantinople and in every tribal disturbance
along the northwest frontier o India. British sea power and Russian land power held
the center o the international stage.

Thirty years later, at the turn o the century, von Tirpitz began to build a German
high seas fleet. I was busy at this time setting up the teaching o political and
historical geography at the universities o Oxford and London, and was noting current
events with a teacher's eye for generalization. The German movement meant, I saw,
that the nation already possessing the greatest organized land power and occupying
the central strategical position in Europe was about to add to itsel sea power strong
enough to neutralize British sea power. The United States was also rising steadily to
the rank o a Great Power. As yet, however, its rise could be measured only in
statistical tables; although in my childhood someone had already been impressed with
American resourcefulness, for I remember in our schoolroom a picture o the battle
between the Merrimac and the Monitor, the first armored ship and the first turret ship.
Thus Germany and the United States came up alongside o Britain and Russia.

The particular events out o which sprang the idea o the Heartland were the British
war in South Africa and the Russian war in Manchuria. The South African war ended
in 1902, and in the spring o 1904 the Russo-Japanese war was clearly imminent. A
paper which I read before the Royal Geographical Society early in the latter year,
entitled "The Geographical Pivot o History," was therefore topical, but it had a
background o many years o observation and thought.

The contrast presented by the British war against the Boers, fought 6,000 miles away
across the ocean, and the war fought by Russia at a comparable distance across the
land expanse o Asia, naturally suggested a parallel contrast between Vasco da Gama
rounding the Cape o Good Hope on his voyage to the Indies, near the end o the
fifteenth century, and the ride o Yermak, the Cossack, at the head o his horsemen,
over the Ural range into Siberia early in the sixteenth century. That comparison in
turn led to a review o the long succession o raids made by the nomadic tribes of
Central Asia, through classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, upon the settled
populations o the crescent o subcontinents: peninsular Europe, the Middle East, the
Indies, and China proper. My conclusion was that,

. . . in the present decade we are for the first time in a position to attempt, with some
degree o completeness, a correlation between the larger geographical and the larger
historical generalizations. For the first time we can perceive something o the real
proportion o features and events on the stage o the whole world, and may seek a
formula which shall express certain aspects, at any rate, o geographical causation in
universal history. I we are fortunate, that formula should have a practical value as
setting into perspective some o the competing forces in current international politics.

The word Heartland occurs once in the 1904 paper, but incidentally and as a
descriptive and not a technical term. The expressions "pivot area" and "pivot state"
were used instead, thus:

The oversetting o the balance o power in favor o the pivot state, resulting in its
expansion over the marginal lands o Euro-Asia, would permit o the use o vast
continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire o the world would then be in
sight. This might happen i Germany were to ally hersel with Russia.

In conclusion, it may be well expressly to point out that the substitution o some new
control o the inland area for that o Russia would not tend to reduce the geographical
significance o the pivot position. Were the Chinese, for instance, organized by the
Japanese, to overthrow the Russian Empire and conquer its territory, they might
constitute the yellow peril to the world's freedom just because they would add an
oceanic frontage to the resources o the great continent.

At the end o the First World War, my book, "Democratic Ideals and Reality," was
published in London and New York.[i] Clearly the "pivot" label, which had been
appropriate for an academic thesis at the beginning o the century, was no longer
adequate to the international situation as it emerged from that first great crisis o our
world revolution: hence "Ideals," "Realities" and the "Heartland." But the fact that,
even when additional criteria were brought to bear, the thesis o 1904 still sufficed as
the background for an estimate o the position fifteen years later, gave confidence that
the formula sought had been found.

II

We turn now to the main object o the present article -- the drafting o an interim
estimate o the value o the Heartland concept in a survey o the world preliminary to
the coming settlement. It must be understood that I am dealing with strategy, which,
o course, is effective in peacetime no less than in wartime. I do not presume to join in
the wide-sweeping debates already in progress which look forward over generations to
come; I center my thoughts on the years during which the enemy is to be held down
while, in the language o Casablanca, his philosophy o war is being killed.

The Heartland is the northern part and the interior o Euro-Asia. It extends from the
Arctic coast down to the central deserts, and has as its western limits the broad
isthmus between the Baltic and Black Seas. The concept does not admit o precise
definition on the map for the reason that it is based on three separate aspects of
physical geography which, while reinforcing one another, are not exactly coincident.
First o all, we have in this region by far the widest lowland plain on the face o the
globe. Secondly, there flow across that plain some great navigable rivers; certain of
them go north to the Arctic Sea and are inaccessible from the ocean because it is
cumbered with ice, while others flow into inland waters, such as the Caspian, which
have no exit to the ocean. Thirdly, there is here a grassland zone which, until within
the last century and a half, presented ideal conditions for the development o high
mobility by camel and horse-riding nomads. O the three features mentioned, the
river basins are the easiest to present cartographically; the water divide which delimits
the whole group o Arctic and "continental" rivers into a single unit does isolate neatly
on the map a vast coherent area which is the Heartland according to that particular
criterion. The mere exclusion o sea mobility and sea power, however, is a negative if
important differential; it was the plain and the grassland belt which offered the
positive conditions conducive to the other type o mobility, that proper to the prairie.
As for the grassland, it traverses the whole breadth o the plain but does not cover its
entire surface. Notwithstanding these apparent discrepancies, the Heartland provides
a sufficient physical basis for strategical thinking. To go further and to simplify
geography artificially would be misleading.

For our present purpose it is sufficiently accurate to say that the territory o the
U.S.S.R. is equivalent to the Heartland, except in one direction. In order to
demarcate that exception -- a great one -- let us draw a direct line, some 5,500 miles
long, westward from Bering Strait to Rumania. Three thousand miles from Bering
Strait that line will cross the Yenisei River, flowing northward from the borders of
Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean. Eastward o that great river lies a generally rugged
country o mountains, plateaux and valleys, covered almost from end to end with
coniferous forests; this I shall call Lenaland, from its central feature, the great River
Lena. This is not included in Heartland Russia. Lenaland Russia has an area o three
and three-quarter million square miles, but a population o only some six millions, of
whom almost five millions are settled along the transcontinental railroad from Irkutsk
to Vladivostok. In the remainder o this territory there are on the average over three
square miles for every inhabitant. The rich natural resources -- timber, water power
and minerals -- are as yet practically untouched.

West o the Yenisei lies what I have described as Heartland Russia, a plain extending
2,500 miles north and south, and 2,500 miles east and west. It contains four and a
quarter million square miles and a population o more than 170 millions. The
population is increasing at the rate o three millions a year.

The simplest and probably the most effective way o presenting the strategical values
o the Russian Heartland is to compare them with those o France. In the case of
France, however, the historical background is the First World War while in the case of
Russia it is the Second World War.

France, like Russia, is a compact country, as long as it is broad, but not quite so well-
rounded as the Heartland and therefore with a rather smaller area in proportion to the
length o boundary to be defended. It is encompassed by sea and mountain, except to
the northeast. In 1914-18 there were no hostile countries behind the Alps and the
Pyrenees, and the fleets o France and her allies dominated the seas. The French and
allied armies, deployed across the open northeastern frontier, were therefore well
defended on either flank and were secure in the rear. The tragic lowland gateway in
the northeast, through which so many armies have surged inward and outward, is 300
miles wide between the Vosges and the North Sea. In 1914, the line o battle, pivoting
on the Vosges, wheeled backward to the Marne; and at the end o the war, in 1918, it
wheeled forward on the same pivot. Through the four years' interval the elastic front
sagged and bent but did not break even in the face o the great German attack in the
spring o 1918. Thus, as it proved, there was space within the country sufficient both
for defense in depth and for strategical retreat. Unfortunately for France, however, her
principal industrial area was in that northeastern sector where the unceasing battle was
waged.

Russia repeats in essentials the pattern o France, but on a greater scale and with her
open frontier turned westward instead o northeastward. In the present war the
Russian army is aligned across that open frontier. In its rear is the vast plain o the
Heartland, available for defense in depth and for strategic retreat. Away back, this
plain recedes eastward into the natural bulwarks constituted by the "inaccessible"
Arctic coast, the Lenaland wilderness behind the Yenisei, and the fringe o mountains
from the Altai to the Hindu Kush, backed by the Gobi, Tibetan and Iranian deserts.
These three barriers have breadth and substance, and far excel in defensive value the
coasts and mountains which engird France.

It is true that the Arctic shore is no longer inaccessible in the absolute sense that held
until a few years ago. Convoys o merchant ships, assisted by powerful icebreakers and
with airplanes reconnoitring ahead for water lanes through the ice pack, have traded to
the Obi and Yenisei Rivers, and even to the Lena River; but a hostile invasion across
the vast area o circum-polar ice and over the Tundra mosses and Targa forests of
Northern Siberia seems almost impossible in the face o Soviet land-based air defense.

To complete the comparison between France and Russia, let us consider the relative
scales o some parallel facts. Heartland Russia has four times the population, four
times as wide an open frontier, and twenty times the area o France. That open
frontier is not disproportionate to the Russian population; and to equal the breadth of
the Soviet deployment Germany has had to eke out her more limited manpower by
diluting it with less effective troops drawn from her subject countries. In one
important respect, however, Russia began her second war with Germany in no better
position than France occupied in 1914; as with France, her most developed agriculture
and industries lay directly in the path o the invader. The second Five Year Plan would
have remedied that situation had the German aggression been delayed a couple of
years. Perhaps that was one o Hitler's reasons for breaking his treaty with Stalin in
1941.

The vast potentialities o the Heartland, however, to say nothing o the natural
reserves in Lenaland, are strategically well placed. Industries are growing rapidly in
such localities as the southern Urals, in the very pivot o the pivot area, and in the rich
Kuznetsk coal basin in the lee o the great natural barriers east o the upper Yenisei
River. In 1938 Russia produced more o the following foodstuffs than any other
country in the world: wheat, barley, oats, rye and sugar beets. More manganese was
produced in Russia than in any other country. It was bracketed with the United States
in the first place as regards iron, and it stood second place in production o petroleum.
As for coal, Mikhaylov makes the statement that the resources o the Kuznetsk and
Krasnoyarsk coal basins are each estimated to be capable o supplying the
requirements o the whole world for 300 years.[ii] The policy o the Soviet
Government was to balance imports and exports during the first Five Year Plan.
Except in a very few commodities the country is capable o producing everything
which it requires.
All things considered, the conclusion is unavoidable that i the Soviet Union emerges
from this war as conqueror o Germany, she must rank as the greatest land Power on
the globe. Moreover, she will be the Power in the strategically strongest defensive
position. The Heartland is the greatest natural fortress on earth. For the first time in
history it is manned by a garrison sufficient both in number and quality.

III

I cannot pretend to exhaust the subject o the Heartland, the citadel o land power on
the great mainland o the world, in a short article like this. But a few words should be
devoted to another concept to balance it.

From Casablanca there came lately the call to destroy the ruling German philosophy.
That can be done only by irrigating the German mind with the clean water o a rival
philosophy. I assume that for, say, two years from the time the "cease fire" order is
given, the Allies will occupy Berlin, try the criminals, fix frontiers on the spot and
complete other surgical treatment so that the older generation in Germany which will
die impenitent and bitter cannot again misrepresent history to the younger
generation. But it would obviously be worse than useless to set alien teachers to work
in Germany to inculcate the theory o freedom. Freedom cannot be taught; it can only
be given to those who can use it. However, the polluted channel might be swept clear
very effectively i it were controlled by strong embankments o power on either hand -
- land power to the east, in the Heartland, and sea power to the west, in the North
Atlantic basin. Face the German mind with an enduring certainty that any war fought
by Germany must be a war on two unshakable fronts, and the Germans themselves will
solve the problem.

For this to happen it will be necessary in the first place that there be effective and
lasting coöperation between America, Britain and France, the first for depth of
defense, the second as the moated forward stronghold -- a Malta on a grander scale --
and the third as the defensible bridgehead. The last is no less essential than the other
two, because sea power must in the final resort be amphibious i it is to balance land
power. In the second place, it is necessary that those three and the fourth conqueror,
Russia, be pledged together to coöperate immediately i any breach o the peace is
threatened, so that the devil in Germany can never again get its head up and must die
by inanition.

Some persons today seem to dream o a global air power which will "liquidate" both
fleets and armies. I am impressed, however, by the broad implications o a recent
utterance o a practical airman: "Air power depends absolutely on the efficiency o its
ground organization." That is too large a subject to discuss within the limits o this
paper. It can only be said that no adequate proo has yet been presented that air
fighting will not follow the long history o all kinds o warfare by presenting
alternations o offensive and defensive tactical superiority, meanwhile effecting few
permanent changes in strategical conditions.

I make no pretense to forecasting the future o humanity. What I am concerned with

are the conditions under which we set about winning the peace when victory in the
war has been achieved. In regard to the pattern o the postwar world, now being
studied by many people for the first time, it is important that a line should be
carefully drawn between idealistic blueprints and realistic and scholarly maps
presenting concepts -- political, economic, strategic, and so forth -- based on the
recognition o obstinate facts.

With that in mind, attention might be drawn to a great feature o global geography: a
girdle, as it were, hung around the north polar regions. It begins as the Sahara desert,
is followed as one moves eastward by the Arabian, Iranian, Tibetan and Mongolian
deserts, and then extends, by way o the wildernesses o Lenaland, Alaska and the
Laurentian shield o Canada, to the sub-arid belt o the western United States. That
girdle o deserts and wildernesses is a feature o the first importance in global
geography. Within it lie two related features o almost equal significance: the
Heartland, and the basin o the Midland Ocean (North Atlantic) with its four
subsidiaries (Mediterranean, Baltic, Arctic and Caribbean Seas). Outside the girdle is
the Great Ocean (Pacific, Indian and South Atlantic) and the lands which drain to it
(Asiatic Monsoon lands, Australia, South America and Africa south o the Sahara).

Archimedes said he could lift the world i he could find a fulcrum on which to rest his
lever. All the world cannot be lifted back to prosperity at once. The region between
the Missouri and the Yenisei, with its great trunk routes for merchant aircraft between
Chicago-New York and London-Moscow, and all that the development o them will
stand for, must be the first care, for it must be the fulcrum. Wisely the conquering of
Japan waits for a while. In due course China will receive capital on a generous scale as
a debt o honor, to help in her romantic adventure o building for a quarter of
humanity a new civilization, neither quite Eastern nor quite Western. Then the
ordering o the Outer World will be relatively easy, with China, the United States and
the United Kingdom leading the way, the last two each followed by its trail o a
commonwealth o free nations -- for though their histories will have been different the
result will be similar. But the first enterprise undertaken in economic rebuilding will
surely have to be in the area within the desert girdle, lest a whole civilization should
deliquesce into chaos. What a pity the alliance, negotiated after Versailles, between the
United States, the United Kingdom and France was not implemented! What trouble
and sadness that act might have saved!

IV

And now, to complete my picture o the pattern o the round world, let me add,
briefly, three concepts to the two already visualized. For the purposes o what I see
described in American writings as "Grand Strategy," it is necessary to build broad
generalizations in geography no less than in history and economics.

I have described my concept o the Heartland, which I have no hesitation in saying is

more valid and useful today than it was either twenty or forty years ago. I have said
how it is set in its girdle o broad natural defenses -- ice-clad Polar Sea, forested and
rugged Lenaland, and Central Asiatic mountain and arid tableland. The girdle is
incomplete, however, because o an open gateway, a thousand miles wide, admitting
from Peninsular Europe into the interior plain through the broad isthmus between the
Baltic and Black Seas. For the first time in all history there is within this vast natural
fortress a garrison adequate to deny entry to the German invader. Given that fact, and
the defenses to the flanks and rear which I have described, the sheer breadth o the
open gateway is an advantage, for it provides the opportunity o defeating the enemy
by compelling him to make a broad deployment o his manpower. And upon and
beneath the Heartland there is a store o rich soil for cultivation and o ores and fuels
for extraction, the equal -- or thereabouts -- o all that lies upon and beneath the
United States and the Canadian Dominion.

I have suggested that a current o cleansing counter-philosophy, canalized between

unbreachable embankments o power, may sweep the German mind clear o its black
magic. Surely no one is going to be mad enough to set foreign teachers to exorcize the
evil spirits from the soul o the conquered German nation. Nor, after the first
inevitable punitory years, do I have sufficient trust that the conquering democracies
will maintain garrisons o the necessary spirit and number stationed in the vanquished
lands; for there is no use in asking democrats to persist in an attitude contrary to the
very spirit and essence o democracy. The cleansing stream might better be released to
flow from some regenerate and regenerating German source, between the
embankments o power I have named, the one within the Heartland and the other
within the territories o the three amphibious powers, American, British and French.
The two friendly forces facing one another across the flow o the canal would be of
equal power and should always be equally ready for necessary action. Then Germany
would live continuously under the threat o immediate war on two fronts should she
be guilty o any breach o the treaties which prohibited either physical preparation for
war or the misleading o youth which is another way o preparation for war. The
democratic garrisons in their home countries would be, by force o example, the
teachers.

On this proposal follows my second geographical concept, that o the Midland Ocean
-- the North Atlantic -- and its dependent seas and river basins. Without laboring the
details o that concept, let me picture it again in its three elements -- a bridgehead in
France, a moated aerodrome in Britain, and a reserve o trained manpower, agriculture
and industries in the eastern United States and Canada. So far as war-potential goes,
both the United States and Canada are Atlantic countries, and since instant land-
warfare is in view, both the bridgehead and the moated aerodrome are essential to
amphibious power.

The three remaining concepts I shall do little more than sketch, and only for the sake
o globular completeness and balance. Girdling the twin unit just described --
Heartland and the basin o the Midland Ocean -- there appears on the globe the
mantle o vacancies, constituting a practically continuous land-space covering some
twelve million square miles -- that is, about a quarter o all the land on the globe.
Upon this vast area there lives today a total population o less than thirty millions, or,
say, one-seventieth o the population o the globe. Airplanes will, o course, fly along
many routes over this girdle o wilderness; and through it will be driven trunk motor
roads. But for long to come it will break social continuity between the major
communities o mankind on the globe.[iii]

The fourth o my concepts embraces on either side o the South Atlantic the tropical
rain-forests o South America and Africa. I these were subdued to agriculture and
inhabited with the present density o tropical Java, they might sustain a thousand
million people, always provided that medicine had rendered the tropics as productive
o human energy as the temperate zones.

Fifthly, and lastly, a thousand million people o ancient oriental civilization inhabit the
Monsoon lands o India and China. They must grow to prosperity in the same years in
which Germany and Japan are being tamed to civilization. They will then balance that
other thousand million who live between the Missouri and the Yenisei. A balanced
globe o human beings. And happy, because balanced and thus free.
[i]
A new edition, with text unaltered, was published last year by Henry Holt and
Company, New York.
[ii] N. Mikhaylov, "Soviet Geography." London: Methuen, 1937.
[iii] Some day, incidentally, when coal and oil are exhausted, the Sahara may become
the trap for capturing direct power from the Sun.

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